Matty Healy Comes "Clean" About the Origin of "Medicine"

posted by Katrina Nattress -

Dec 4, 2018

The 1975may have just released their highly anticipated third album, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, last Friday (November 30), but on Monday (December 3), the band's Matty Healy took things back a few years to address the origins of "Medicine" — a song the band wrote for a special re-score of the movie Drive in 2014.

"I think I have to come clean and admit this was never a metaphor," the singer admitted via Twitter. "It's not about a girl. You know what it's about. And I've always felt weird about it. And I'm kind of sorry."

The 29-year-old is referring to his struggles with heroin addiction, which he's been very open about after getting sober last year.That information gives the slow burning song's first verse, "I find it hard to say bye / Even in the state of you and I / And how can I refuse? / Yeah, you rid me of the blues / Ever since you came into my life," a whole new meaning.

"I won’t delve into what the song is about lyrically because frankly I want to put those ideas to bed," Healy wrote in the song's YouTube description, "but being provided with the context in which Medicine came to be, it allowed the song to become a mausoleum for those ideas, captured, diverted and frozen forever."

"I think I'm trying to consciously hide it behind being somebody else, writing about their struggle and their strife," the singer explained to Pitchfork about the choice to use a character named "Danny" in the song. "It’s quite obvious it’s about me, because there’s been a real reluctance for me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about being a heroin addict for five years —having actual nightmares of the idea of it being uncovered. So there was a humorous reluctance to disclose it in this song."

"That was the thing that I was always scared of—being an obnoxious celebration of that kind of sickness," he continued. "I just felt so lucky. I hadn’t lost anything really. And that’s normally why people go to rehab, because they lost so much they can’t bear to lose anything else. But I was lucky."